Thursday, July 28, 2016

Sitecore has some issues working with Solr Cloud out of the box. There is an unofficial patch for it here. I was able to get it to work with my setup (8.1 rev 160302, Solr Cloud 5.3.1, Castle.Windsor 3.3), with the following modifications.

No changes to the Global.asax file. Use the default one.

Disable the file Sitecore.ContentSearch.SolrProvider.CastleWindsorIntegration.dll in the \bin folder.

Add the file Sitecore.Support.405677.Windsor.dll to the \bin folder.

Add the file Sitecore.Support.ContentSearch.Solr.WindsorInitializer.405677.config to the \Include\Sitecore.Support.405677 folder.

Add the file Sitecore.Support.449298.dll to the \bin folder.

Add the file Sitecore.Support.449298.config to the \Include\Sitecore.Support.449298 folder.

Add the file Sitecore.Support.449298.SwitchOnRebuild.IndexConfig.example to the \Include\Sitecore.Support.449298 folder.

Enable and configure the file Sitecore.Support.449298.SwitchOnRebuild.IndexConfig.example. This includes setting the collection names for the master, web and core indexes, as well as the ServiceBaseAddress of your Solr instance.

The SolrCloud.config file switches ALL the Sitecore indexes over to using the patched Solr Cloud indexing. Feel free to edit this as needed, or to include your own custom indexes in here.

Note: Make sure that your Solr instance has all the cores that you've declared in these indexes. IE: sitecore_master_index, sitecore_master_index_secondary, etc.

WARNING: When using this patch, you will notice some ERRORS appearing in your log that coincide with whenever you open the Index Manager window. I have confirmed with Sitecore Support that this is just noise and can be ignored, it doesn't affect the functionality of the patch.

"You can safely ignore these messages. They indeed happen to Indexing manager and bound to the fact that we can't get index summary in the current realization of this patch. But this shouldn't affect indexing and everything should work fine."